OK, so who’s the biggest security risk, then?

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From Wired.com.

For years, members of the military brass have been warning that soldiers' blogs could pose a security threat by leaking sensitive wartime information. But a series of online audits, conducted by the Army, suggests that official Defense Department websites post far more potentially-harmful than blogs do.

The audits, performed by the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell between January 2006 and January 2007, found at least 1,813 violations of operational security policy on 878 official military websites. In contrast, the 10-man, Manassas, Virginia, unit discovered 28 breaches, at most, on 594 individual blogs during the same period.

The results were obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, after the digital rights group filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.

"It's clear that official Army websites are the real security problem, not blogs," said EFF staff attorney Marcia Hofmann. "Bloggers, on the whole, have been very careful and conscientious. It's a pretty major disparity." The findings stand in stark contrast to Army statements about the risks that blogs pose.

Laptops in class

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Interesting post by Eoin O’Dell of TCD law school on an issue that vexes an increasing number of university teachers.

I’ve been on both sides of these laptops, and I’m going to break ranks and admit something to those students reading this blog: from the front of the class, I can often tell when someone is concentrating on the screen for reasons other than the class. For example, it’s pretty obvious if you’re furiously typing away while everyone else is doing nothing at all, studiously failing to answer a question I’ve just posed – gotcha! you’re drafting an email or updating a profile, aren’t you? Now, this is an extreme example, but there are lots of obvious examples short of that, and even if I don’t notice every non-classroom related usage, I do notice a lot of them. And in my class, you run the risk of having a few questions directed specifically to you just when you’re deepest into your online distraction. But I don’t see myself going any further and seeking to turn off the wifi or even ban the laptops. I think that the benefits of technology far, far outweigh the detriments. And, in any event, people who are bored in class will daydream even if they don’t surf.

Gonzo in retrospect

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On Saturday we went to see Alex Gibney’s documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, which was simply wonderful. It’s a warts-and-all portrait which does not shy away from Thompson’s amazingly powerful instinct for self-destruction. I’m old enough to regard him as a contemporary, but Gibney’s film will give younger generations an insight into how remarkable a writer and personality Gonzo was. What I hadn’t fully appreciated at the time (partly, I suppose, because in those pre-Internet days, very few people on this side of the Atlantic had access to Rolling Stone magazine) was how moralistic (in the best sense) he was. I hadn’t realised, for example, how committed he was to George McGovern’s presidential campaign (as tragically flawed, in its way, as Al Gore’s in 2000). And how he was largely responsible for catapaulting Jimmy Carter from the obscurity of a Southern governorship to a successful presidential candidate.

The film is thus very informative. It is also outrageously funny, intriguing and moving without being sentimental. Johnny Depp reads from Thompson’s works (and is revealed as a friend and loyal admirer). And by using Thompson’s writing as voiceover, it reminds one of what a terrific writer he could be. At his best he was like Hemingway without the macho crap.

One of his great gifts was that he was a maestro of beginnings. Anyone who writes for a living will envy him that because the toughest thing is to find an arresting way of opening a piece. I know from my own experience, for example, that if I wake up on a Friday morning with a good first sentence for my newspaper column, then the job is half done. Thompson had a way of starting that took you by the scruff of the neck and dumped you, rubbing the sleep out of your psyche, into the middle of things.

LATER: Critics were less impressed by the film than I was. The great Philip French, for example, was relatively detached:

Gibney’s elaborately textured film draws on much home movie footage, new interviews, old TV appearances and clips from the feature films inspired by Thompson’s antics (he’s played by Bill Murray in Where the Buffalo Roam and Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). It’s often hilarious and captures the spirit of the time, both in its early hopes and its inevitable disillusionment. Yet it’s a sad movie and somehow inadequate in its lack of true pity or understanding. Thompson’s first wife, Sondi, mother of his son Juan, put up with him for 20 years, until his excesses and egotism forced her to leave, and it is she alone who says: “I think his story was tragic.”

And it is she who demurs from a general agreement that his suicide, like that of Hemingway, was somehow a courageous act. In this documentary, we watch a man go insane and destroy himself, his final act of madness being the funeral he organised in which his ashes were sent into the skies with red, white and blue fireworks from a self-aggrandising tower he’d designed with the help of Steadman.

Peter Bradshaw was marginally more positive:

Young radicals become old reactionaries, of course, although unlike many gung-ho liberals, Thompson never lost his nerve and supported the military adventures of George W Bush. His uncool male-pattern baldness made him resemble Philip Larkin, and that cigarette-holder was a weirdly bohemian, almost Cowardian affectation, which passes unremarked by Gibney or anyone else. In the end, a lot of his work is like a massive improvised guitar solo. Maybe you had to be there. But he emerges from this film as a real American original.

And today one of my colleagues, an English don, gave me a hard time today for being hard on Hemingway. I have an awful feeling he may have been right. Sigh.

Aperture and the Nikon D700

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Aperture — Apple’s digital image management software — displays a strange glitch when one’s trying to upload photographs from a Nikon D700. So long as the images are jpegs, there’s no problem. But if you’ve been shooting RAW then Aperture can’t see the images on the camera — and therefore won’t upload them. (Interestingly, iPhoto can see them.)

Initially I thought that this was because I needed to install some extra plug-ins, but as far as I can see I’m up to date with everything. After Googling the problem it became clear that it’s a problem with Aperture not seeing the camera as a mass storage device. But if you take the CF card out of the camera and insert it into a USB card reader, then the program can see the RAW images and you’re home and dried.

LATER: Richard Earney writes:

Grabbing images off the camera directly can be a cause of data corruption, due to differences in the way the concept of mass storage devices are treated by various OSs and whether the USB ports have the right power.

So Adobe, for instance, strongly recommend using a card reader!

The road less travelled

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After days and days of muddy brown light, the sun shone this morning. So I packed camera and lenses and went for a walk in the woods. There was a freezing wind up on the ridge outside Wimpole, so much so that it was painful to hold the camera, even with leather gloves on. And yet it was lovely to be there, listening to the wind sighing through the trees, and picking my way over rotten branches and fallen trees. At one point I was standing contemplating the view and thinking about lenses when I heard voices raised in desultory conversation, and then two horsemen passed me and politely said “Good morning”. After they’d moved on, I fell to thinking of one of my favourite poems. And took the picture.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

LATER: Quentin reminded me of his own poetical venture in this territory!

Wealth capture

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Great Observer column by Simon Caulkin.

What's been lost over the last three decades is only now becoming clear. Some of the warning signs were already visible in the succession of increasingly frequent panics and scandals of the last decade and a half – Enron, the dotcom boom, LTCM. Less obviously, the last 30 years have seen a steady erosion of balance between stakeholders. While layoffs of staff – "the most important asset" – were once a last resort for employers, they are now the first option. Outsourcing is so prevalent that it needs no justification. And the company's welfare role is now so attenuated that it barely exists. First to go was the notion of career; more recently, the tearing-up of company pension obligations is another unilateral recasting of the conditions of work – a historic step backwards – that has aroused barely a ripple of objection.

The justification for this behaviour is, of course, the pressure of the market. But this is to disguise a betrayal. As a class, ever since the separation of ownership and management in the 19th century, managers have always occupied a neutral position at the heart of the enterprise – neither labour nor capital, but charged with combining the two for the benefit of both the company and society itself.

Everything changed in the 1980s, however, with the advent of Reagan, Thatcher and Chicago School economists who preached the alignment of management with shareholders in the name of "efficiency". In effect, "efficiency" came to mean short-term earnings to the detriment of long-term organisation-building; what was touted as "wealth creation" was actually "wealth capture", from suppliers, clients and employees as well as competitors, on the grandest scale since the robber barons. Its purest expression was private equity.

Managers never looked back. As late as the 1980s, a multiple of 20 times the earnings of the average worker was perfectly adequate CEO pay. But under the compliant gaze of shareholders and remuneration committees, performance-pay contracts boosted the ratio to 275 times by 2007.

As we now know, "performance pay" was a misnomer, an incentive for financial engineering that has destroyed value on a heroic scale. But it's not just shareholder value that has suffered. By severing any common interest between top managers and the rest of the workforce, fake performance pay has fatally undermined the internal compact that makes organisations thrive in the long term.